Using association rules to identify root causes of CRD in broilers

Abstract

Chronic Respiratory Disease (CRD) in broilers poses some management challenges for the poultry meat industry since the disease discovery often comes too late. Raw meat from infected chickens must be excluded from being processed into cooked poultry product. Many factors from raising process are considered to contribute to such disease. Thus, finding root causes of CRD would help the farmers to have better control and prevent disease and also help the processing facilities to have a better estimation of raw meat amount. In this paper, we apply associate rules technique to identify the root causes of CRD. Possible factors were first identified by skilled veterinarians. Then collected data from several farms were used to find sets of factors that could potentially be the root causes. From the results we can identify set of general factors that are common root causes on all farms as well as sets of farm-dependent factors.